Re: installer problems

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 3:52 PM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> On fre, 2010-09-24 at 09:01 +0100, Dave Page wrote:
>> How else would you suggest we find out what may go wrong on an
>> unsupported platform?
>
> Well, some amount of robust and defensive programming can probably
> create better error messages in even the most unknown environment.
> Especially since the product you're creating is to some degree intended
> for newbies.

We're pretty restricted on how we can handle errors in the installer.
When we want to do more complex things, we call out to helper programs
and scripts where we can more effectively handle errors, but when it's
one of those that is failing to even run properly it's difficult to
deal with every possibility.

> Now I suspect that the problem of the user might be unrelated to the
> installer not actually supporting the host platform, but I'm questioning
> the approach of dismissing error messages like "child killed" and
> "floating-point exception" with "unsupported, don't care".

Well I'm struggling to see where floating-point exception might come
from anyway. The code that apparently gave the error doesn't have any
floating point arithmetic in it, so it must be coming from some other
library or glibc. Much as it would be nice to know whats going on,
it's simply not practical to chase such bugs on platforms we haven't
tested so "unsupported" really is the only option.

> Note also that actually finding out which platforms are supported
> requires the unsuspecting user to download a PDF file and scroll down a
> few pages, whereas the way it's presented for download might give the
> impression in runs everywhere.

The download page states exactly what distros we consider supported.

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

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